Dell Buys Boomi – Is an Acquisition Spree on the Way?

Dell is buying Boomi, an SaaS provider that provides services for moving applications to the cloud.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Boomi has made a name for itself in that sweet spot where cloud computing meets the enterprise. It’s a fitting acquisition for Dell. it provides the company with a way to go deeper into the enterprise stack and be the company that provides the systems for integrating with the cloud.

And why is this important? The network is increasingly porous. The data center is networking with the cloud. At this point, it’s a race to control how that transition happens. It’s where we see almost all of the large vendors establishing a foothold. VMware, Microsoft and a host of others are offering ways to be that bridge.

That’s critical for Dell, which has to move beyond the PC and into the world of tablets and cloud-based operating systems.

Ray Wang, an analyst with the Altimeter Group, says the acquisition may be the first of many to come:

“Integration vendors who can connect cloud to on-premises are a key component in any vendor’s strategy to master the cloud. Dell’s move shows it has an intention to move towards the cloud and will continue to acquire key pieces such as CEP engines, big data solutions, and semantic web players. Other area that will be important will come from medium as well as large scale analytics, and storage. Let’s see what they do next.”

What do you think? What does this acquisition signal for the cloud computing world?

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